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Reverse Engineering the Technical and Artistic Genius of Painter Jan Vermeer
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Kurt Anderson has an interesting read at Vanity Fair about Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, best known for 'Girl with a Pearl Earring,' and the search for how he was able to achieve his photo-realistic effects in the 1600s. Considered almost as mysterious and unfathomable as Shakespeare in literature, Vermeer at age 21, with no recorded training as an apprentice, began painting masterful, singular, uncannily realistic pictures of light-filled rooms and ethereal young women. 'Despite occasional speculation over the years that an optical device somehow enabled Vermeer to paint his pictures, the art-history establishment has remained adamant in its romantic conviction: maybe he was inspired somehow by lens-projected images, but his only exceptional tool for making art was his astounding eye, his otherworldly genius,' says Anderson. To try to learn how Vermeer was able to achieve such highly realistic painting, American inventor and millionaire Tim Jenison spent five years learning how to make lenses himself using 17th-century techniques, mixed and painted only with pigments available in the late 1600s and even constructed a life-size reproduction of Vermeer's room with wooden beams, checkerboard floor, and plastered walls. The result has been a documentary movie, Tim's Vermeer, by magicians Penn & Teller that may have resolved the riddle and explains why it has remained a secret for so long. 'The photorealistic painters of our time, none of them share their techniques,' says Teller. 'The Spiderman people aren't talking to the Avatar people. When [David] Copperfield and I have lunch, we aren't giving away absolutely everything.'"
and don't pretend to be one, but I don't believe this "discovery" in any way belittles the talent of Vermeer. He was the artistic nerd of his time and his discovery is quite extraordinary - how many people today would think to do that?
I think the postulated optical aids are really a less interesting part of all this. What makes his paintings start out aren't that they have lots of accurate detail - they do, but that's not that rare - but that they have very accurate color. The rooms look realistic because the color values are right: they all have the same lighting temperature, to remarkable accuracy.
Getting the color palette just right is what impresses me about paintings from Vermeer to modern artists in the same style, but the modern guys have a very mature science to work from and just need to make the colors match precisely to the calculated ideal.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
One of the points that severely diminishes the credibility of "Secret knowledge" optical theories, in my eyes, is that they are simultaneously presented as being so secret as to never be recorded and transmitted to the present day, and as being in such wide-spread use that there is evidence to be found in major works over many centuries and continents. As a closely-guarded guild secret for one small, local, and ephemeral school of painters, which died off before being transmitted to the present day, perhaps the hypothesis is plausible. However, the sheer weight and volume of "evidence" presented by Hockney et al., in which optical techniques are a ubiquitous foundation for every vaguely photo-realistic painting since the early 15th century, is impossible to reconcile with those techniques being absent from historical commentary and received tradition.